25 watts per 5 gallons is reccomended. Get one that has a control knob. The 7.5 says it is good up to 5 gallons and may be. But I don't think they have an adjustment on them. If a heater is overworked it will have a greater possibility to fail or worse over heat the aquarium. A 25 watt with an adjustment knob is the way to go. I like the freshwater master test kit by aquarium pharmaceuticals. I prefer the reagent type vs. multi test strips. In the long run the set is less expensive. The color cards are easier to read then some others, IMO. It has the vital tests you need pH, ammonia, nitrite and nitrate. The strips ammonia test are sometimes skewed and are not accurate in some instances. It's like a Jr High chemistry set. You can get a small bottle of Prime by seachem or amquel+ ( I use prime, again a price thing you need less to treat more then amquel+, so it goes a long way) even though this is mainly for dechlorination it also removes ammonia and other crap. It can be double dosed to keep very high ammonia in check. Zeolite also helps. Usually just frequent water changes will dilute the water. If you read any of the bio-chemistry articles in the link I gave you you can see how pH plays a factor in the toxicity of ammonia and nitrites. Having well water is nice but you "could" have other issues to contend with. One major factor is pH, not so much for type of fish but it can really mess with establishing a nitrogen cycle. Water parameters will determine What% water to change and how often. After it is established, for regular maintainance IME with smaller aquariums I have found it better to do a smaller% more often, rule of thumb is 25% every 2 weeks minimally. If you have a Bio-wheel then you can change the cartridge part as the directions for it state. If you want to save a little$, make a slit in the blue fiber and dump out the activated carbon and replace it with new from a bulk container. I never had a problem in the past ( when I was a kid) establishing an aquarium. When I decided to start it up again (after 20 yrs.) I had alot of trouble. The city supplied water in the town I grew up in was pretty good quality and all I did was keep buckets of tap water on hand for water changes. I only had one test kit, pH, the litmus(sp?) paper. When that ran out I never replaced it. The only difference was water chemistry everything else I did was identical. The things I am mentioning are not gospel as the only way to do this. However, down the road when you may want to try different fish, live plants etc. it really helps to know how your system works and what is needed to maintain it. The only time I test the water now is if I suspect a problem or it has been a while since the last test. I always test new aquariums until I'm satisfied that they are OK. If Victoria's doesn't have what you need maybe Fredrick's ?? Also, don't get me wrong, I support independent fish stores but the link below can help for some of the things you may need that they can't order for you. Just click on the fish when you get there. Here is a link that might be useful: The good Dr.'s

I am amused to hear there is house envy extended both ways. :P It reminds me of when Mitzi joined us. We were all jealous of all the native flora of Brazil and she said she wished she could grow Tulips. @ Ingrid I am enjoying looking through your blog very much. How fun that you got your cuttings of Mathilde from Emilio Begine himself! I love your photographs, too, especially the ones of the swing flower garden and the shaggy pony by the shore. I think you live in a wonderful place! I am looking forward to reading more - but must work now. :P @ Mitzi I agree with you. I tell people to think of my plants like having another pet. There is a lot of work involved, but it gives you a peaceful feeling to care for them and interact with them.

The trick to designing a site is making it flexible enough were it looks generally how you want it for everybody who looks at it, but where people with special needs can still use the site without much trouble. If you want an image lined up vertically beside a text string done as a graphic, and the two sets balanced on the page taking up a certain portion of the width (horizontal) screen space, then its better do place the graphics with things like a table set to 90% screen with, centered, and the images in the cells themselves arranged with centering and justification commands, becasue those are goingto keep things in the same *relative* positions no matter what screen size the end user is viewing with. Absolute positioning using DIV tags makes a screen that looks great for one screen size, ok for the few sizes close to that, but it can create some truly unreadable websites on older browsers, non-Windows operating systems, browsers for the visually or physically impared, and people with significantly different monitor resolutions than the one it is designed on. DIV tags should only be used as a last resort, and then only for formatting major sections of the screen, and using smaller tables after that to handing particular strips of horizontal and vertical alignment. I did use DIV tags on one page of my employer's site http://windhamschooldistrict.org/index.php and I had to go back and tweak the code very specifically at least a dozen times after viewing it with about 8 differnt browser & OS combinations in order to get results that looked better than laying it out in a table and living with a little extra whitespace. But without viewing it with both Netscape and IE on both a Mac and a PC, I could not tell how my choices for the DIV positionings and style tweaks were blowing up or causing text overlaps. It took about a week of tweaks before I was satisfied with it, and I've been designing web sites since before you could put pictures on a webpage. Lazygardens *is* giving good advice. I always start my client's sites by laying out the content and the functional aspects. On the last site we did, the shopping cart and storefront was built before we even decided on a color scheme or a logo. Only after we laid out what we wanted the site to do, what we wanted it to say, and how we were going to lead their customers through the site did we start putting in bells and whistles. Why? Because the bells and whistles are secondary to the site content. Not everyone can hear background music or see images (some people block them from downloading to save bandwidth on slow connections) Everyone that browses the web can benefit from text. Even the visually impared can get benefit from a photo album with creative descriptions of what you want the image to convey. If you have company staying the night, you want to put clean sheets on the bed before dropping a mint on top. If you put the mint on the bed *before* changing the sheets, it only gets in the way while you are trying to get the truly necessary stuff done. I'm not oppossed to putting fluff and frills on a page, *IFF* its something that enhances the page content instead of being something that intereferes with the real content of the page. Content and functionality has to come first, otherwise visitor set off looking for a site that's less of a pain to use.

Nope not me. The only lie I have ever told my husband was when we were courting. I told him that I would do the West Coast Trail which is on the west side of Vancouver Island and takes about 7 days to hike. You have to carry every thing in with you including food and there aren't even outhouses never mind showers, and if you don't check the tide tables before you set up your tent for the night you might drown. A couple of years after we were married he asked if I wanted to do the hike for our next holiday. I asked him if there was electricity and he said no. That was that. I will ski in blizzards and I will run in PNW monsoons but I won't camp without electricity. Hey, but I gave him two sons and so he can do it if he wants. He still hasn't done it.